It was yet another afternoon / early evening of "gridlock" in Sittingbourne again today (Tuesday 2nd July) due to the continuing closure of the Kingsferry Bridge.
The bridge remains closed, for essential maintenance work by Network Rail, until 5am on Sunday (7th July). This will also be the case across the weekend of Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th July and then another full week's closure from Saturday 20th July until Saturday 27th July.
Along with the closure of the northbound entry slip for the A249 at Iwade/Grovehurst and traffic having to use the A249 southbound towards Bobbing and then northbound carriageway again towards the Isle Of Sheppey it has been a "perfect storm" for delays in both directions throughout the whole of Sittingbourne - not being helped by a collision on the Bobbing Roundabout this afternoon and the outage of traffic lights on Bell Road / St Michael's Road in the centre of town.
Local taxi firm boss, Nick Childs of Green Cabs, told SFM News: "How is any taxi business meant to make any money with this traffic?" He said his drivers and passegers were stuck in traffic for hours both yesterday (Monday 1st July) and again today.
Cllr Mike Whiting, who represents Sheppey on Kent County Council, told SFM News: "A number of residents have written to me about the jams on the A249 in recent days. I know they moved some of the works to take account of some mock exams but clearly they haven’t caught all of them. I spoke to the chap in charge at Network Rail, which owns the bridge, last Friday (28th June) and he assured me they had run through their plans with National Highways, KCC Highways and Swale Borough Council along with Kent Police, the Kent Fire & Rescue Serivce and South East Coast Ambulance service to check there were no known issues".
He went on to add: "The slip roads at Grovehurst should have been re-opened before the closure of the bridge and I’ve asked for a full report on what is causing the issues and how we can avoid it for the rest of this week. I’ll share any reply ASAP."
Online one resident told him: "It's quite obvious what the problem is, we have only one 'on-slip' northbound onto the A249 which is at Bobbing. All traffic from the Grovehurst junction has to double back to Bobbing to access the northbound A249. Plus all of the traffic leaving Sittingbourne at Bobbing and all traffic leaving Iwade at Bobbing. Once you include the normal traffic on the A249 northbound carriageway, we have four lanes all trying to filter down to one lane on the A249 because of the Grovehurst works." She asked: "Would it be possible to reinstate both lanes of the northbound A249 temporarily whilst the Kingsferry Bridge is closed? The on-slip at Grovehurst is still under construction, so this cannot be re-opened yet."
A Kent County Council spokesman told SFM News: “We are aware Network Rail are undertaking urgent work to the Kingsferry Bridge. Our teams have been working closely with Network Rail and we note its bridge works have been planned to minimise the impact to pupils travelling to sit exams during the summer. It is not possible to remove the traffic management from the southbound A249 as part of KCC’s Grovehurst Road Improvement Scheme to coincide with closures of Kingsferry Bridge, as the project is at a stage where doing so would create a significant risk to road users. We recognise major works are disruptive and we will continue to work with partners to monitor the situation.”
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